StephenKMackSD's Blog

Niall Ferguson reminds his readers in his essay Obama's Gotta Go, in both Newsweek and on the Daily Beast, that he was a good sport, a good loser in the 2008 election. No more Mr. Nice Guy, is his assertion, tied to the usual layer of inflated Ferguson egoism and self-aggrandizement: it's a package deal. There are the usual characters that inhabit the manufactured Ferguson Political Melodrama; The failed wobbly liberal incompetence of Barack Obama is, at this point, the protagonist and villain of the piece. Although some observers of the political practice of President Obama would deem it a moderate conservatism, but that will not do for the polemical intent of Mr. F. The stalled economy, rising debt and the pernicious Affordable Care Act play their parts in this diatribe, that acts as an indictment. About the political decline of the Republican Party, into the dead end of nihilist ideological purity, is a subject of no interest, yet the parade of Robespierres that have taken over the party, day by day, brings it's trajectory to the margins of American life into unsavory focus. Mr. Ferguson is a Conservative thinker and as such has made a contribution toward the victory of that very particular iteration of Conservative philosophy, some would call it unrecognizable, indeed a destructive hybrid, or more pointedly, a kind of Manicheanism. I must not in my analysis and my haste forget other important characters mentioned by our dramaturge (there are many, but I will select the most important) : Simpson -Bowles, The Arab Spring, the economic rise of China, that will exceed American success, a re-imagined Yellow Peril (a favorite, even a stock character) and of course Mr. F.'s current political romance with Rep. Paul Ryan. Now, mind you, Mr. F.'s support for the Romney/Ryan ticket seems predicated on his adoration, there is no other word for it, of the economics of Rep. Ryan, not to mention that Mr. F. has met and talked with him, and assures his readers of his probity and virtue. For the skeptics, like myself, an antidote to Mr. F.s apologetics, his enthusiasm can be found in Matt Millers collection of essays on Rep. Paul Ryan's economics and in Paul Krugman's column of August 19, 2012 titled An Unserious Man. For further insight, see Paul Krugman's reply titled Unethical Commentary, Newsweek Edition to Mr. F.'s essay.

Political Observer

If you thought that the summer hiatus of August offers no political interest, here is a story at the respectably conservative Economist titled 'When insurgents are incumbents'. It offer a window on the search for ideological purity that obsesses the Republican Party of 2012: to such an extent that the moderate conservative Senator Richard Lugar was defeated in a recent Indiana primary election. Doing the peoples business is then relegated to a minor role, while the ideological purity exemplified by the political theology of the Tea Party and of the ruthless Mr. Grover Norquist is ascendant. One wonders when the American electorate will tire of the Manichean principles that dominate it's political discourse, and to the political nihilism of this collection of Robespierres, that has and will crush the heretics, no matter where they hide, even if it be in the very bosom of the Party? The story at the Economist concentrates it's analytical energies on the horse race with ideological issues taking a role along side of the contest between David Schweikert and Ben Quayle, of the redrawn sixth congressional district of Arizona. It is all boringly familiar, except for those attuned to the ideological and moral imperatives that animate the Republican Party in 2012. The candidate's web sites are filled with pictures and videos of community and political supporters, while written positions are brief, minimal, as in positions on issues of concern to voters. The thank yous for attended events and support are effusive. Here it is in all it's detail and it's essential themes of a contest for likability, trust and above all else, political purity.

Political Observer

Mr. Joshua Trevino has a penchant for repeating the cliches, the tropes of American Conservatism, by way of Samuel P. Huntington, Bush The Younger and the muscular present day American Fundamentalist Christianity. Add to that list of precursors the names of Leo Strauss and his sub rosa ally Carl Schmitt. With a kind of unctuous self-congratulation, Mr. Trevino tell us – and be reminded elegantly- that he is displaying and arguing self-evident truths. His essay titled Too Good to Win, Is the West Losing the War appears on The Brussels Journal website, that advertises itself as 'The Voice of Conservatism In Europe'. This was originally a speech before delivered to the California Republican Jewish Coalition (RJW) on Saturday, 21 June 2008. Mr. Trevino manages to touch on the deeply held beliefs, even the prejudices of his audience, he is nothing if not politic. The audience is Jewish, Conservative, Republican, Neo-Conservative, American Likudnik? Or is the last sentence a glaring tautology? And more importantly is the label American Likudnik Anti-Semitic? I'll have to leave that pressing question for another occasion. To those who find this collection of the hackneyed, the shopworn less than edifying, he will dismiss your comment as irrelevant or worse. When angered, Mr. Trevino reverts to childish taunt, his poise and self-satisfied rhetorical elegance deserts him and a pathos, of sorts, takes the lead.

Day One of his Politics begins on September 11, 2001. He celebrates the American Wound as the genesis of his fable of the benevolence of the American Hegemony, and the mendacity and bad faith of 'The Muslim World', with assurances of his knowledge of the benighted political/existential and geographical spaces that comprise that construct. But the real story here is Mr. Trevino's touching and revelatory re-imagination of his nine year old self, discovering the political truth and magic of Ronald Reagan. It has all the heart warming sentimentality of the dull black and white of a 1940's Hollywood movie, and the lethal, pernicious nihilism of the Republican Party of our own age.

Political Observer

Helen Gurley Brown is dead. The world is in mourning. The lady who set sixties American aflame with her runaway bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl, that was turned into a forgettable, but profitable and popular, Hollywood movie starring Natalie Wood and Tony Curtis, was an exponent of the ambitious career girl of another age.The questions, then, were how to succeed in a male dominated world using your feminine wiles, while maintaining that femininity – tall order! The celebrated age of Mad Men,at least for those nostalgic for their lost power and prestige, where men ruled the roost and called the shots on who got promoted, and who got fired. It was a simpler age. Helen reeked the ethos of the corporate self-promoter circa 1950. She was a climber in the age of the climber,corporate and social. No apology needed, she was just one of many.(The humiliation of the Depression ruled the aspirations of a generation.) Don't confuse Ms. Brown with her contemporary Betty Friedan, whose bestseller The Feminine Mystique shared that bestseller list with her book. No old line leftist,she never attacked masculine privilege, she practiced a kind of knowing accommodation, that used the assertion of male power as a fulcrum to gain hard won advantage, via the use of her femininity and her ability to know her antagonist's weak points. Disguised as feminine chatter about the importance of owning the perfect 'little black dress' etc., and the soft-core porn covers for her magazine Cosmo, that, by the way, cemented the position of the push up bra in the American fashion vernacular, she was the precursor to the two great titans of contemporary American publishing, Tina Brown and Arianna Huffington.
Sincerely yours,
Myra B.

Hey, it's Myra B. here. Just got around to reading my favorite conservative columnist, David Brooks. The title of the essay of August 2, 2012 is The Credit Illusion. Mr. B. is most pathetic when attempts to be funny. It always seems like a misfire, if you know what I mean. His literary cover is a letter addressed to an advice columnist called Mr. Opinion Guy, from a letter writer who identifies as Confused in Columbus. Well, as they used to say sixty years ago on T.V., hilarity ensues. Except that this essay can't quite make up it's mind to be funny or just be the same old tired moralizing that is a staple of his regular opinionating. So he does a bit of both, with dismal result. It sounded like a Sam Levenson routine from sixty years ago. Mr. L's stand up routines, he a former public school teacher with a penchant for a brand of hectoring comedy, now utterly and thankfully passe: sometimes producing cringing laughter in mid-afternoon audiences on the Arthur Godfrey Show, as I recall. Except, that Mr. L. had such appeal, because he would become hopelessly tickled, by his own routine, and he would laugh with a kind of appealing embarrassment, that made him an audience favorite. 
Mr. B's resort to 'humor' is occasioned by President Obama's comments on the dependence of all citizens on the infrastructure, both human and material, that supports capital endeavors. Of course, Mr. Brooks can't pass up an opportunity to mildly lampoon, as that assertion of self-evident, but politically usable truth telling, can't be passed up. The life path of the bourgeois white male is carefully described and foreshortened to the point of caricature. Mr. B. in print has none of the appeal of Mr. L. on that twenty one inch black and white screen of yesterday. The force of personality is the lesson of both Hollywood and television, alas for Mr. B. print captures his mundane chatter with dismal fidelity.
Truly yours,
Myra B.            

http://www.ullsteinbuchverlage.de/ullsteinhc/buch.php?id=17789&page=suche…

http://tls.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/viewer.aspx

Mr. Leslie Gelb continues to trade on the shopworn assumption that a reader of his foreign policy essays will find his stance, as outsider, credible. It pushes it to the point of fracture. Consult his impressive C. V. for confirmation of his establishment credentials. Yet he still continues to use this rhetorical pose as the starting point for his latest piece at The Daily Beast titled Kofi Annan’s Exit: Why Obama Should Lead From Behind In Syria. Outsiders don't receive e mail from members of the President's staff, or at the least, don't mention that communication to their readers, if they feel bound to protect their public image as outsider. What does the play of the notion of the insider/outsider duality contribute to an act of advocacy, of argumentative clarification? Perhaps, the political notion of the expert and of expertise has now reached a point of exhaustion in the public mind. Once an article of faith in policy circles, Mr. Gelb trades upon the oscillation between the decline in respect for experts/expertise and the insider/outsider dyad to enhance the reception of his opinionating. Mr. Gelb presents himself in the role of rational political thinker, the mean between two positions and their arguments political and moral, The Neo-Conservative and Liberal interventionists in the matter of the bloody and protracted Syrian civil war. Mr. Gelb advocates a policy of 'leading from behind' for President Obama. The political framing of our exhausted moral/economic/political capital in Iraq and Afghanistan and the myriad fronts of drone 'warfare' are the unmentioned background of this essay. Leading from behind is insider language, the jargon of the foreign policy adept. It describes, in an obtuse way, the very notion and practice of diplomacy. The question of the countries nearest to the war zone having a vested interest in a peaceful resolution to the conflict seems self-evident, to the point of the absurdly simplistic. We can view Mr. Gelb's opinionating as valuable in two ways: as the self-serving political propaganda of a shadow member of the Obama administration,and as the product of one of the architects of a failed foreign policy, that fostered and rationalized the successive Assad regimes as part of an ad hoc defense of Israel.

Political Observer

Mr. Brooks begins his New York Times essay of July 31 2012 Dullest Campaign Ever by paraphrasing the Reagan speech writer and the Wall Street Journal's columnist Peggy Noonan: the Presidential campaign is inconsequential and boring. Ms. Noonan exemplifies, for me, the tone deafness and self-congratulation Modern American Conservatism, pre and post Reagan. As a writer of speeches attuned the the central conceits of that conservatism: Free Market economics, the myth of white victim-hood, the evils of socialism, indeed, even a mild form of social democracy, Ms. Noonan has been an adroit phrase maker. One thinks of the usable political kitsch of 'morning in American', although I don't have knowledge that this is her phrase. Yet no one, who has seen Ms. Noonan opine on television, or read her newspaper column can think that this is a first rate political thinker. She is an opinionator destined to remain superficial, at best. But Mr. Brooks uses her comment as prop for his cliched chatter about his own boredom. Which launches his self-serving ideological line that both the Democrats and the Republicans are guilty of more that just producing the heavy weight of his boredom. Here is just one egregious example of his political dishonesty:

“Instead of saying something new, now they just try to boost turnout within their own demographic niches and suppress turnout in the other guy’s niches.”

Voter suppression laws have been passed in 14 states of the union. All these states are controlled by Republicans. It is an inconvenient truth that Mr. Brooks alludes to, which isn't quite a lie, but mimics that rhetorical entity with disturbing fidelity.As to the campaign being boring, just look at Mitt Romney, a prime example of stupid straight white boy culture. He cannot speak, on any subject, without making a fool of himself. On just the level of the ability to produce cringing laughter, Mr. Romney beats his sclerotic Republican antecedents: Bob Dole, Bush The Elder, Bush The Younger, John McCain, Newt Gingrich. The list is long. Of Mr. Brooks' nine points of complaint: the critical reader of his essay will approach his complaints with a degree of care, as they are deeply immersed in the public vocabulary of his idiosyncratic Neo-Liberalism, that defines itself as post Reagan Republican Conservatism. Mr. Brooks adopts the posture of public scold, in the matter of defending the practice of serious debate about substantial issues, expressed as speeches and position papers that lend the circus of American politics a degree of intellectual and ideological weight. One might simply conjecture that Romney might be an unsafe wager, when it comes to the substance that is the object of  Mr. Brooks' nearly plaintive nostalgia. 

Queer Atheist

David Brooks has a penchant for repeating the most callous, even loathsome, Conservative platitudes about human beings, and tries to pass them off as valuable insights, as the view of a deep thinker, a cogitator on the evil character of 'man'. A kind of moral fatalism he re-animates at will to demonstrate his sagacity. Lets just dismiss his observations on the Olympics as an opportunity to deploy that re-animated cynicism about the human person, in it's group setting, as a political opportunity to tell us, in the briefest of sketches, the lured details of our inherent nature. Reading this essay has the capacity to produce an animus in a critical reader. Mr. Brooks can't pass on the opportunity to give the Liberal readers of the New York Times a firm scolding on their inherent evil. He is driven to lecture on the fallen state of 'man', he quite naturally riffs in a Niebuhrian register of political theology, or to put it in plain language, politically useful moralizing claptrap. I am, of course, pushing polemic to the point of insult. But first we must hear what our thinker has to say about the Dance, a useful and enlightening aside. But, here, he articulates his central concern:

“After the opening ceremony is over, the Olympics turn into a celebration of the competitive virtues: tenacity, courage, excellence, supremacy, discipline and conflict.”

Like so many contemporary American Conservatives, Mr. Brooks is enamored of the martial virtues, but only from the comfort of his study. He celebrates an 'ideal', in a proximate reminiscence of the Hegelian master/slave fight to the death: conflict and cooperation as the dialectic of the human story, in a carefully laundered conservative version. After all this, he neatly sums up with some life lessons about the necessity of incorporating both the practice of competition and cooperation. Mr. Brooks is petit bourgeois to his core.

Political Cynic

http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=18272